Tom Friedman

"The more I read the news, the more it looks to me that four words are becoming obsolete and destined to be dropped from our vocabulary. And those words are ‘privacy,’ ‘local,’ ‘average’ and ‘later.’ A lot of what drives today’s news derives from the fact that privacy is over, local is over, average is over and later is over. Lord knows I have no sympathy for the Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, but . . . ” (“Four Words Going Bye-Bye,” Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, May 20).

In an odd column in Wednesday's New York Times, Tom Friedman praises Chuck Hagel. Friedman doesn't actually praise anything Hagel has ever said or done. He never quotes Hagel nor cites any of Hagel's votes. Indeed, Friedman acknowledges Hagel is "out of the mainstream" on national security issues ranging from Iran to Hamas to the Pentagon budget.

Tom Friedman is a genius. It’s very, very difficult to write a frequent column that expresses deeply conventional wisdom in a fresh, hey-kids-I-just-thought-of-this voice. He is the id of the Washington Establishment.

Looking at Washington these days, one suspects that this is the way things will be for a long time to come. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day (and all that), the massive tangle of dependencies, entitlements, political payoffs, and perpetual pork barrel schemes that is our national government cannot be either taken down or rebuilt along rational lines – if, indeed, it is possible at all – in much less than the 50 years it took to create it.

Reuters: "A small majority of economists -- 30 out of 53 -- surveyed over the past two days said the United States will lose its AAA credit rating from one of the three big ratings agencies -- Standard & Poor's, Moody's or Fitch."

"Want to guess which potential Republican candidate looks ready to pass the pH test on [cap and trade]? Mitch Daniels. In early 2009, when the issue was ill-defined, he was already arguing against it. That's a nice arrow in the quiver the next time he's asked about the 'social truce.'"

With the news of Osama bin Laden’s death sating much of the world’s appetite for reports from the Middle East, the Syrian regime has used what is essentially a media blackout to move against the opposition. As the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat reports:

Chinese style.

First we have Thomas Friedman singing the praises of post-Mao communist China in the New York Times:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.